Discussion on the boundaries of US Civil Townships. Unlike New England towns, they usually were not recorded or commented on by state legislatures, but rather determined at the county level. In the Censuses, these generally were recorded as “Civil Divisions Smaller than Counties.” For this reason, Census Enumeration district maps/descriptions are an invaluable resource for finding their boundaries. See Unified Census ED Finder for these maps.
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Thanks for migrating over here from Discord and the tip about the census map finder! In case you’re looking for a model to follow for California’s historic townships, I’ve previously mapped the townships of Santa Clara County and (in part) Alameda County.
This built on earlier mapping of ranchos in the San Francisco Bay Area and imports of San José and nearby cities like Mountain View. @jeffmeyer had originally mapped some of the ranchos from old plat maps, and then I went in afterward realigning them to old USGS topographic maps based on the descriptions and added dates based on documents on Calisphere and law.resource.org.
For the townships, I used a map of the Bay Area that depicted the townships at a small scale, apparently taking some liberties, to locate the townships:
Then I relied heavily on the boundary descriptions in an 1881 county history, using the boundaries we already had to make educated guesses about the geographic references in the descriptions. For example, it was pretty obvious that the “north-easterly line to the county line” from “the old Santa Clara bridge on the Guadalupe river” that separated Washington and San José townships was extrapolated from the edge of Rancho Rincon de Los Esteros.
There have also been township boundary mapping efforts in other states. @matteditmsts and @BMACS001 have mapped townships extensively in Michigan and New Jersey, respectively. Some of these townships can be more difficult to find by querying the Overpass API, because they lack either border_type=township or admin_level=7 (in states where they contain incorporated places). They might be able to shed some light on good sources to use in those regions.